Lebanon: interview with Middle East expert Prof Juan Cole; and Tikkun, the liberal Jewish magazine, runs a Peace Ad in US

1. Middle East Analyst Juan Cole on War in the Middle East - from Baghdad to Beirut

AMY GOODMAN: Juan Cole is a leading expert on the Middle East. He runs a popular blog at [ juancole.com ] and is also a professor at the University of Michigan. Welcome to Democracy Now!

JUAN COLE: Thank you very much, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Why don't we start with the protests in Iraq in Sadr City that are protesting Israel's bombing of Lebanon?

JUAN COLE: Well, Iraq turns out to be a majority Shiite country, and most of the Shiite Iraqis have repeatedly voted for fairly hard-line fundamentalist religious parties. Since Hezbollah is cut from very much the same cloth, it's not surprising that very large numbers of Iraqi Shiites support their co-religionists in Lebanon.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about, right now, the latest hours in Beirut, the packets that have been dropped, the leaflets that have been dropped on Beirut, calling on residents to leave?

JUAN COLE: Well, the Israeli bombing campaign is only tangentially aimed at hurting Hezbollah. That’s a guerrilla organization. They've gone underground. It's very unlikely that the Israelis can do further harm to them at this point by merely bombing unknown sites. The Israelis are systemically destroying the Lebanese infrastructure. They are hitting bridges. They are continuing to hit roads. They are degrading the ability of the Lebanese to connect with one another. And they are, frankly, putting pressure on the rest of the Lebanese to turn on Hezbollah and to try to control it on behalf of the Israelis.

AMY GOODMAN: And what is the effect of this? How are people in Lebanon responding to Hezbollah?

JUAN COLE: Well, from opinion polling that's been published, it appears to be the case that there's been, on the whole and by and large, a large spike of approval for Hezbollah and support for it, even among the Christian minority, which has gone to 55% support of Hezbollah. So it seems to be the case that the political aim of the Israeli bombing campaign is failing, and so far it doesn't seem to have disabled Hezbollah militarily either.

AMY GOODMAN: Juan Cole, I wanted to ask you about Rumsfeld's testimony yesterday in the Senate. This is what the Defense Secretary had to say.

DONALD RUMSFELD: If we left Iraq prematurely, as the terrorists demand, the enemy would tell us to leave Afghanistan and then withdraw from the Middle East. And if we left the Middle East, they would order us and all those who don't share their militant ideology to leave what they call the occupied Muslim lands, from Spain to the Philippines. And then we would face not only the evil ideology of these violent extremists, but an enemy that will have grown accustomed to succeeding in telling free people everywhere what to do.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Juan Cole, your response?

JUAN COLE: Well, first of all, if he means by "we" the U.S. Pentagon, what are they doing in Spain and the Philippines anyway? But the fact is, this is just a domino kind of thinking from the 1960s, which was fairly ridiculous at the time when applied to communism and has become completely ridiculous when applied to al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda is a small network of maybe 5,000 terrorists spread around 60 countries. They're not going to take over the Philippines and Spain if we withdraw from Iraq. That's ridiculous. Every time Rumsfeld opens his mouth, I just wonder what dimension this man is coming from.

AMY GOODMAN: And Hillary Rodham Clinton calling for his resignation?

JUAN COLE: Well, I mean, people much closer to the Pentagon than she have called for his resignation repeatedly, high generals who are now retired. I mean, anyone can look at the conduct of the U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and conclude that whoever is in charge is either incompetent or a fool, or both.

AMY GOODMAN: Juan Cole, you have written a piece called "A Ceasefire Call in Lebanon Bush Can't Ignore." Talk about who's making the call.

JUAN COLE: Well, the ceasefire has been called for by virtually everybody, the entire Muslim world, most of Europe, the Pope and Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. Sistani is the leader, the spiritual leader of not only the Iraqi Shiite community, but of most of the Shiites who live outside of Iran, Pakistan and elsewhere. So for the United States now to oppose Sistani on the ceasefire call deeply endangers the U.S. troops and the British troops that are in Iraq. They are already facing a determined and fairly successful guerrilla movement among the Sunni Arab population. If the majority Shiites now become militantly anti-American and begin attacking the troops, they can cut off fuel to them, they can hit them, causing casualties. It can much worsen our already very bad situation.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to play for you a clip of an interview we’re going to play after we talk to you with Mohamad Bazzi, Newsday 's Middle East Bureau Chief. He's based in Beirut. I asked him whether he thought the Lebanese government could fall.

MOHAMAD BAZZI: I think there is a possibility. I’ve also heard that -- I've heard some talk that the Lebanese government might actually resign, almost as a way to embarrass the United States even further, because this Lebanese government, most of its members, the majority is backed by the U.S., and the Prime Minister Fouad Siniora is someone who was an ally of Rafik Hariri, and so he had ties to the West that way, and the U.S. was very happy that he was chosen as prime minister. And there is some talk that they might resign as a way to embarrass the U.S., and there is also -- they are in a pretty good position at this point. A lot of people were impressed by how they've handled this, especially in the past week or so, and especially after Qana on Sunday, where they really drew the line and told Rice not to visit Beirut and where they said we’re not going to negotiate over anything at this point until there’s a ceasefire.

AMY GOODMAN: Newsday reporter Mohamad Bazzi, speaking to us from Lebanon. Juan Cole, your response?

JUAN COLE: Well, you know, all of the political progress that has been made in Lebanon in the past year and a half has now been undone. The country is in ruins. Over $2 billion have been done to its economy. The government is increasingly unable to assert itself. I mean, if you knock out all of the major roads and bridges, then how can the government get government bureaucrats and military out, and aid workers and so forth out to where they’re needed? Basically, Lebanon is being crippled, and so it really doesn't matter whether the government falls or not, because the government is not able to function under these conditions. Lebanon is being paralyzed as a civilized society. It’s being reduced to rubble. And so, they can resign or they can not resign, but the fact is the country cannot any longer function.

Israel has destroyed a country here. It was a beautiful country. It was a country with a great deal of potential, and it was finally coming back together after a 20-year civil war, in which Israel itself had played a very sinister role. So for it now to come again and destroy the country under the pretext of fighting Hezbollah, which consists -- fighting Hezbollah has been a very small part of what they have been doing, is a war crime. I mean, the Israelis are guilty, quite frankly, of numerous war crimes, and that's the reason Tony Blair won't say that their response has been indiscriminate -- or has been disproportionate, because disproportionate attacks are war crimes in international law.

AMY GOODMAN: Juan Cole, what are the aims of the players here, of Hezbollah, of Israel, of the United States? And what role is Iran and Syria playing?

JUAN COLE: Well, Hezbollah is mainly a localistic movement. It's a movement that represents the roughly 1.5 million Shiites that live in the south of Lebanon, many of them poor, sharecroppers, tobacco sharecroppers or slum dwellers in cities like Tyre or Southern Beirut, and so it's a movement of the poor. It's a movement that grew up -- you know, we never heard anything about the dangers of the Lebanese Shiites back in the 1960s or back in the 1940s. They have been radicalized, and they have moved to support for Hezbollah, because of a long struggle, an 18-year struggle, to get the Israelis out of Lebanese territory. The Israelis occupied Southern Lebanon all that time and quite brutally, and Hezbollah represents the aspirations for freedom from occupation and for a better life for the Shiites of Southern Lebanon.

Yes, it has foreign backers. It has backers in Syria and Iran, but then that's the way Lebanon works. The Maronite Catholics are backed by France and the United States. The Sunni Lebanese are backed by Saudi Arabia. The objectionable thing to Hezbollah is that it is a paramilitary organization. It's not formally part of the government, although it is represented in the government, but it has 5,000 fighters and all of these rockets, most of them fairly small with a range of about three to four miles.

AMY GOODMAN: And the United States?

JUAN COLE: Well, the United States wants to destroy Hezbollah. It has an old grudge with it, because Hezbollah did hit U.S. targets back in the 1980s, and it is seen by the conservatives in the Bush administration as a cat's paw of Iran. They don't pay attention to its local Lebanese context, and they don't see Israel's repeated invasions and attacks on Lebanon as having provoked this response. And it's likely that a lot of what's being done in Lebanon is a demonstration project. It's an attempt to scare Iran into ceasing its own nuclear enrichment program, which the Iranians maintain is for civilian purposes, but which the West suspects may lead to an Iranian nuclear bomb. So it is said that the Israelis and the hawks in the United States want the Iranians to look at Beirut and think, “Well, gee, that could happen to Tehran if we don't come aboard.”

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask about media coverage here. We did a whole panel on it yesterday -- you’re reading media all over the world as you put together your column, “Informed Comment” -- about overall media coverage, how people are coming to understand this conflict in the United States. And, for example, one of CNN'S chief anchors, Wolf Blitzer, has just returned from Jerusalem, who in the 1970s was an AIPAC lobbyist. What effect do you think that has on the coverage?

JUAN COLE: Well, I have to defend Wolf Blitzer. I mean, everybody has a past somewhere, but he is one of the very few powerful news people in the United States that actually puts Middle Easterners on the screen and lets them speak for themselves. Almost nobody else does that, and so I am sure he has his own point of view on things, but I think he generally plays a positive role in allowing a greater variety of voices to be heard from the region, precisely because he does know the region well.

With regard to general coverage, of course, you know, there is something peculiar about the United States. Its media, its corporate media are very rightwing, and the American public seems to put up with what is, generally speaking, pretty poor news coverage. There are relatively few bureaus left around the world. Most American news reporting from the Middle East is done from Israel, and so it's very skewed. It's pro-Israeli, of course, in a way that the news gathering in virtually any other country in the world besides Israel is not.

On the other hand, because Lebanon was a cosmopolitan country that was highly interlinked with the rest of the world, I think the Israelis have been surprised by the degree to which they have been unable to hide from the world the worst consequences of their bombing raids, and I think the Israelis have not been able to keep the world from knowing what's happening in Lebanon, in a way that they generally do succeed in Gaza and the West Bank.

And by the way, the situation in Gaza, where the Israelis knocked out the major power plant and where they have made repeated incursions, air raids, tank incursions and so forth against Palestinians, which there's been high rates of death of Palestinian civilians, all of this has gone under the radar, because the world is focused on Lebanon, which is a much more accessible story still than the West Bank and Gaza.

AMY GOODMAN: Juan Cole, I wanted to move from the Middle East to academia here at home, connected to the Middle East, and that is your being rejected by Yale University, though it looked like you were the top candidate to be a professor there. And I wanted to read to you from the Wall Street Journal from April and get your response. It says, "Meanwhile, Yale faces a new challenge in the next few days. The university may hire Juan Cole, a history professor at the University of Michigan, to fill a new spot as a Professor of Contemporary Middle East Studies." It says, "Cole's appointment would be problematic on several fronts: first, his scholarship is largely on 19th century Middle East, not on contemporary issues." Then it quotes Michael Rubin, a Yale graduate and editor of the Middle East Quarterly , saying "He's abandoned scholarship in favor of blog commentary. Mr. Cole’s postings at his blog, ‘Informed Comment,’ appear to be a far cry from scholarship. They feature highly polemical writing and dubious conspiracy theories," the article says, and then goes on to say, "In justifying all the time he spends on his blog, Mr. Cole told the Yale Herald that when you become a public intellectual, it has the effect of dragging you into a lot of mud. Mr. Cole has done his share of splattering," the article says. "He calls Israel the most dangerous regime in the Middle East. That ties in with his recurring theme that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee effectively controls Congress and much of U.S. foreign policy." That from the Wall Street Journal in April. Can you respond to all of it and what happened to your attempt to become a professor at Yale?

JUAN COLE: Well, first of all, I never applied for a job at Yale. Some people at Yale asked if they could look at me for a senior appointment. I said, "Look all you want." So that's up to them. Senior professors are like baseball players. You’re being looked at by other teams all the time. If it doesn't result in an offer, then nobody takes it seriously. Some neo-con journalists have tried to make this a big scandal. Who knows what their hiring process is like, what things they were looking for? I think it's a tempest in a teapot.

With regard to the press attacks on myself, of course, John Fund just made up those quotes that he attributed to me. I never said anything like that Israel is the most dangerous regime in the Middle East. It's a lie. And all kinds of lies are told about my stances all the time, despite the fact that everything that I've said about these issues can be keyword searched on Google, and you can see the actual quote fairly easily. Instead a concateny of lies has been put together and attributed to me.

And, well, you know, this comes with the territory. I don't care. You know, Thomas Jefferson and all of our predecessors, as American intellectuals, had been maligned and their characters impugned and all kinds of lies told about them. It's part of being an American. We have a First Amendment. We have freedom of speech. If John Fund wants to tell lies about me, let him tell lies. I don't care. If people want to believe them, let them believe them. I don't care about that either.

The fact is that John Fund came on television and said that he thought it had been a big mistake not to support the coming to power in the early 1990s of the Islamic Salvation Front. Part of the Islamic Salvation Front was Ahmed Ressam, who later attempted to bomb LAX. So John Fund has a big problem, it seems to me, with his stances. If he wants to attribute these kinds of sentiments to other people, he should explain why he takes these stances himself. And why does the Wall Street Journal support someone who can't get his facts right and who supports the Islamic Salvation Front coming to power in Algeria? So, you know, it's a rough and ready world out there. If you can't stand the heat, don't come into the kitchen.

AMY GOODMAN: Juan Cole, I want to thank you very much for joining us, Professor of Modern Middle East and South Asian History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His website is “ Informed Comment ,” where he provides a daily roundup of news and events in the Middle East, and we will link to it at democracynow.org, joining us from Ann Arbor.


2. Tikkun runs Peace Ad about Lebanon (is this the first crack in the wall of unthinking pro-Israel behavior from America’s Jews?)

We at Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives ask you to join our effort to place ads in national and international newspapers calling for an end to the slaughter in Lebanon, Israel and the Occupied Territories—and to use this moment not only to create a temporary ceasefire, but to resolve all outstanding issues between the various parties in the Middle East.

We are calling upon the international community to foster a new approach to resolving conflicts. We approach these issues from our commitment to a “Progressive Middle Path,” recognizing that in the context of the past 120 years, both sides have legitimate grievances and both sides have acted with insensitivity and cruelty toward the other. We do not accept that one side is the “righteous victim” and the other side the “evil aggressor.” But we do recognize that at this moment Israel has far greater military power, and so we ask for Israel to take the first steps toward ending the cycle of hatred and violence, even as we condemn Hezbollah for initiating the current escalation of violence.

We have placed this ad in the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times, and plan to reprint in newspapers in Israel, Palestine, Lebanon. The U.S. has a large role to play in bringing about a resolution to the conflict, and we are hopeful that ads in U.S. newspapers will help us raise money to buy space in other media.

Since we began this campaign, over 3,000 people have signed. This campaign is producing results. Before we began to raise funds for the Peace Ad, our perspective was almost entirely blocked out by the mainstream media. Over the course of the past week, the media has finally begun to pay attention. I was invited to speak on CNN and Larry King Live. We believe that this campaign could make a huge contribution toward strengthening the peace and reconciliation forces around the world to communicate that there are many of us in the U.S., Canada, Israel, and Palestine as well as many Jews, Muslims and Christians and people of other faith communities who reject the dominant assumptions of the contemporary discourse about the Middle East and how best to fight terrorism.

So, we are now asking you to join us in stretching your wallet and digging very deep to help us get this ad published.

Many blessings for a world of peace, kindness, generosity and love.

Rabbi Michael Lerner
(Editor, Tikkun Magazine & Author: The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right)

If you read the ad and think, how on earth will this fit onto one page, view the PDF version at www.tikkun.org/PeaceAd .

Here is the text of the ad:

STOP THE SLAUGHTER IN LEBANON, ISRAEL AND THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES!

Convene an International Middle East Peace Conference to Impose a Final Settlement on All Parties

In the name of our sisters and brothers suffering and dying in Lebanon, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, we, the undersigned, call upon the Israeli government, the leaderships of Hezbollah and Hamas, the U.S. Government, the international community and the United Nations to immediately take the following steps to stop the war in these countries:

1. We call upon Hezbollah and Hamas to immediately stop shelling or otherwise engaging in violence against Israel. These actions, which have killed numerous Israeli civilians, terrorized the people of Israel and damaged many towns and cities, played a central role in provoking the current crisis, and do nothing but harm the cause of Palestinian and Lebanese independence and democracy. It is this kind of violence which has over the years pushed many decent Israelis into the hands of its most militaristic and insensitive political leaders.

2. We call upon the Israeli government to immediately halt its attacks on Lebanon. We join with the Israeli peace movement and the thousands of Israelis who demonstrated against this war in Tel Aviv on July 22, 2006 in their insistence that these attacks are utterly disproportionate to the initial provocation by Hezbollah, have killed innumerable innocent civilians, displaced one million people, destroyed billions of dollars of Lebanon’s infrastructure, and will not, in the long run, secure peace or security for Israel. We also call on the Israeli government to supply food, electricity, water and funds to repair the humanitarian crisis caused by its invasion of Gaza.

3. We call upon the U.S. and governments around the world to insist that Israel, Hezbollah and Hamas implement a lasting ceasefire, place an immediate embargo on all shipments of weapons to all parties in the war (including Syria and Iran), and join an international conference to provide security on the border between Israel and Lebanon. By endorsing Israel’s attacks, sending it new supplies of weapons, and explicitly giving it time to do more damage to the people of Lebanon, the U.S. government has become a party to this violence, which, together with American military action in Iraq, is sure to create enmity toward the U.S. and Israel in the Muslim world for generations to come.

These are the minimum steps necessary to stop the violence and the humanitarian disaster in southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. But these steps alone will not ensure that the region doesn’t return to an untenable status quo which will again eventually break into violence and new rounds of warfare.

We therefore also issue:

A call for Lasting Peace

We call for an International Peace Conference to impose a fair and lasting solution to all aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to the conflict between Israel and other states in the region. Why do we say “impose”? There are too many forces in each country in the region who are committed to continuing this struggle forever. Their provocations will continue until the international community stops the violence once and for all and imposes conditions of security that will allow the peace and reconciliation forces in each country to flourish.

Such a solution would be based on the following conditions:

a. The creation of an economically and politically viable Palestinian state (roughly on the pre-1967 borders with minor border modifications mutually agreed upon between Israel and Palestine); and simultaneously the full and unequivocal recognition by Palestinians and the State of Palestine and all surrounding Arab states of the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state offering full and equal rights to all of its non-Jewish citizens;

b. An international consortium to provide reparations for Palestinians who have lost homes or property from 1947 to the present, and reparations for Jewish refugees from Arab states from 1947–1967;

c. A long-term international peacekeeping force to separate Hezbollah and Israel in southern Lebanon and to protect Israel and Palestine from each other and from other forces in the region who might seek to control or destroy either state; and

d. The quick imposition of robust sanctions against any party that refuses to sign or violates these agreements.

A New Spirit of Open-Heartedness and Reconciliation

We know that no political solution can work without a change of consciousness that minimally includes an open-heartedness and willingness to recognize the humanity of the Other, and repentance and atonement for the long history of insensitivity and cruelty to the other side.

Both sides must take immediate steps to stop the discourse of violence and demeaning of the other in their media, their religious institutions, and their school text books and educational systems. They should implement this by creating a joint authority with each other and with moral leaders in the international community who can supervise, and if necessary, replace those in positions of power in both societies who continue to use the public institutions of the society to spread hatred or nurture anger at the other.

Once the other parts of a lasting peace have been set in place, we call upon the parties to this struggle to launch a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, following the model used in South Africa.

Use This Moment to Challenge the Paranoid and Cynical “Political Realism” That Generates Endless Wars

The self-described “realistic” version of global politics asserts that we live in a world in which our safety can only be achieved through domination, or others will seek to dominate us first. Of course, when we act on this assumption, it becomes self-fulfilling.

We propose, instead, a strategy of generosity—to act on the assumption that people have an enormous capacity for goodness and generosity (without negating the truth that certain conditions promote fear, anger and hatred which sometimes are expressed in horribly destructive ways). For the U.S. and other G8 countries, we call for a Global Marshall Plan: for each of the next twenty years, the U.S. and other G8 countries should dedicate 5% of their Gross Domestic Product to eliminating global (and domestic) hunger, homelessness, poverty, inadequate health care and inadequate education for the peoples of the world. This would have to be carefully monitored and apportioned in ways that ensure the care reaches the people for whom it was intended. But what is critical is the spirit in which it is done.

Similarly, we are aware that eventually the world (plus new and better missiles from the Arab world) will force Israel to accept terms of lasting peace we propose above. But it would be better for Israel, the U.S., and for Jews around the world if Israel were to do so now without being forced, and in a spirit of open-heartedness, generosity and recognition of the Palestinian people’s humanity and equal rights for security and dignity—and it would save countless lives of young Israelis and Arabs alike.

The only protection that we in the advanced industrial countries of the world can ever really have for our lives is to spread a spirit of love so powerful and genuine that it becomes capable of reducing the anger that has understandably developed against the powerful and the wealthy of the world.

The “cynical realists” claim that others are entrenched in their hatefulness, and that war and domination is the only way to battle them. This kind of thinking has led to five thousand years of people fighting wars in order to “end all wars”—and it has not worked. It’s time now to try a new strategy of generosity, both economic generosity and generosity of spirit. As stated above, there will first have to be a transitional period in which real military protections are available to people on all sides of the struggle. But by beginning now to simultaneously commit our economic resources and change the way that we talk about those whom we previously designated as “enemies,” we can begin the long process of thawing out angers that have existed for many generations.

Nothing can redeem the deaths and suffering that all sides have faced in this struggle for the past 120 years. But this very moment could also be the time in which the human race realizes the futility of violence and comes together not only to impose a lasting solution for the Middle East, but to begin a new era and to recognize that our own well-being depends on the well-being of everyone else on the planet. The International Middle East Peace Conference should be structured to achieve this end—which means it should have an explicit psychological and spiritual dimension and a visionary agenda.

We Affirm the Sacredness of All Human Beings.

This may well be the last chance we in the advanced industrial societies have to avoid international catastrophe (either environmental or nuclear) by modeling something else besides brute power, military might and indifference to the well-being of others. If not now, when?

It is time to overcome national chauvinism and arrogance—but also our own personal sense of powerlessness. We need to build ethical and spiritual solidarity among the people of the world—the necessary foundation for effective political and economic cooperation. Our well being depends on the well being of everyone else on the planet. We need to strengthen international institutions that can foster this sense of solidarity, but we also need to support political and spiritual movements that encourage a transformation of the heart away from the excessive focus on our own individual egos, paths to success and “making it” in terms of fame, glory, sexual attractiveness, accumulation of “things” and money, so that we and all the peoples of the world can put our joint attention to building global peace, social and economic justice, ecological sanity, and a new spirit of mutual caring, genuine and lasting love and generosity. It’s too self-indulgent to let depression about the state of the world render you powerless—your participation is indispensable for changing the world.

Unrealistic? Nope. What has proved unrealistic time and again—whether we are talking about U.S. policy in Vietnam and Iraq or Israeli and Arab policies in the Middle East—is the fantasy that one more war will put an end to wars. The path to peace must be a path of peace.

We are joining with The National Council of Churches of Christ and many other religious groups in the call for days of prayer and fasting toward the aim of peace, reconciliation and affirming the message in this ad. Use this ad as a way to start discussions with people in your life. And please sign the ad and donate (www.tikkun.org/PeaceAd) so we can reprint it elsewhere. When you do so, include your email address, and we will alert you to other actions that we can take together.

This ad sponsored by:
Tikkun: A Bimonthly Jewish Critique of Politics, Culture and Society
The Network of Spiritual Progressives (www.spiritualprogressives.org), and
The Shalom Center (www.shalomctr.org)